Product Details

• Actors: Alan Rosenberg, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Bell (II), Irving Kristol, Irving Howe
• Directors: Joseph Dorman
• Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC
• Language: English
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Studio: FIRST RUN FEATURES
• DVD Release Date: March 22, 2005
• Run Time: 109 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B0006Z2NKY
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #117,148 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "Arguing the World" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

ARGUING THE WORLD - DVD Movie

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Intellectual metamorphosis, April 28, 2005

By 

A viewer from Summit, NJ (Summit, NJ USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Arguing the World (DVD)

This excellent documentary traces the careers and political evolutions of four "New York intellectuals": Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Irving Howe and Irving Kristol. They all started as anti-Stalinist leftists at City College of NY in the Thirties; wrote for "Partisan Review," "Dissent," "Commentary" and other left-wing and liberal publications; published erudite books, and received teaching positions at prestige universities. And, except for Howe, they all moved well to the right as they got older.

All of this is fascinating, especially the transition to the right, and their collision with the New Left in the Sixties. By that time, they'd all gotten recognition and prestigious university appointments--in Bob Dylan's words, they now "had something to protect." They're uniformly critical of the student radicals who sought them out in the early days of the New Left. Glazer, author of "Beyond the Melting Pot," refused to support the "Free Speech Movement" at UC Berkeley, while Bell and Howe have special disdain for Tom Hayden of SDS (Howe says "he had something of the Commissar about him," while Bell calls him "the Richard Nixon of the Left"). The (aging) New Leftists interviewed have equal scorn for them--Hayden says that they were spouting off while "I was going to jail for my beliefs" and dismisses Howe pithily: "I wasn't raised in a household where everyone shouted at each other." A former Berkeley student says, "Their idea of protest was to write a letter to the editor." Only Howe (who translated Yiddish poetry and wrote a highly regarded history of Jews in NYC) remained faithful to Socialism. Glazer and Bell moved to the right of the middle, while Kristol became a friend and adviser to Reagan and the darling of the Neoconservative movement, and gets plaudits on this film from William F. Buckley Jr. and Jeanne Kirkpatrick.

I found this documentary highly satisfying. Even though all of them are or were old enough to be my father, I strongly identified with their poor and working-class NYC upbringings, and admired their dedication to intellectual life. The film does a great job of evoking the intellectual/literary NYC salons of the Forties and Fifties. It's also not without humor.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Arguing the World, November 21, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Arguing the World [VHS] (VHS Tape)

This is probably the most coherent and mesmerizing documentary on the birth of Socialism in America and the direct impact it had in fueling the radical upsurgence in the sixties. I absolutely loved this film.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A glimpse into the origin of contemporary politics, March 31, 2007

By 

tribecan (new york city) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Arguing the World (DVD)

This is a wonderful film, entertaining and intelligent, about a generation of intellectuals who met at City College in the nineteen-thirties, immediately began arguing, and never stopped. They became the dominant intellectuals in New York City for more than thirty years, spawning not only the New Left but also the original neo-conservatives. If you're at all interested in where the arguments that now dominate American politics came from, this is an invaluable film. And even if you're not, it's an entertaining collection of personalities for whom the quest to understand the world was always a vigorous wrestling match.